Role-Playing Game (Dungeons & Dragons)

In the early 1980s, Americans discovered that a sheet of paper, a handful of oddly shaped dice and some shared imagination added up, somehow, to Satanism. The fantasy role-playing game Dungeons & Dragons (published by the small Wisconsin firm TSR in 1974) became a flashpoint in the wider Satanic Panic, the decade-long American conviction that covert devil-worshippers were everywhere. A role-playing game, for anyone who has never played one, is a kind of collaborative storytelling with rules; one player describes a situation (a dungeon, a dragon, a town full of suspicious peasants), the others describe what their invented characters do about it, and the dice decide the uncertain bits. In D&D the world is sword-and-sorcery, so players do cast imaginary spells and fight imaginary demons. This was enough.

Critics claimed the game was a gateway to real witchcraft, real demonology, real teenage suicide. Patricia Pulling, the grieving mother of a teenager called Irving who had killed himself in 1982, founded Bothered About Dungeons & Dragons (BADD) and toured the country warning that the game was driving players to madness and self-harm. The fire was further fed by the 1979 disappearance of a Michigan student called James Dallas Egbert III — initially blamed on D&D-induced delusions in the university's steam tunnels, and later shown to be nothing of the sort, but about personal and academic pressures unrelated to the game. Then came a 1985 60 Minutes segment on CBS, the Tom Hanks TV movie Mazes and Monsters (1982), and the evangelical cartoonist Jack Chick's tract Dark Dungeons (1984), in which a teenager learns a "real" spell and a friend kills herself.

The rebuttal, when it came, was thorough. The novelist and games writer Michael Stackpole's 1990 Pulling Report pulled BADD's statistics apart line by line and showed that the suicide rate among role-playing gamers was actually lower than their peers'. By 1991 the US Centers for Disease Control, the American Association of Suicidology and Health & Welfare Canada had all declared the game safe. The D&D panic is now a standard textbook example of how anecdote, grief and moral entrepreneurship can manufacture a "link" to harm that the underlying evidence never actually supported, and it is worth remembering the next time someone claims a new hobby is turning the children.